Island, by Aldous Huxley

Here’s a classic novel which somehow I’d managed not to read over the years. Actually, I thought I had read it… somewhere in the back of my mind I told myself that I’d already read this one, and put it aside to “reread” much later.

Island is Aldous Huxley’s vision of utopia – a mysterious, remote, tropical island nation in Southeast Asia. It is a rather clunky novel, actually, which serves, from my perspective, as an often careless vehicle for Huxley’s philosophical and political perspectives. It revolves around the arrival of a newspaper reporter, Will Farnaby, on the eponymous island, Pala. He has been sent to negotiate on behalf of his employer for the rights to drill for oil on Pala.

The entire book essentially follows Will as he recuperates from a fall whilst arriving on the island, and at absolutely every conceivable turn, he is taught in bizarrely eloquent terms, the precise history and philosophy of Pala. The island was once a Buddhist society, rather primitive in its ways, but with many valuable qualities. At some point a Scottish doctor arrived, and the perfect hybrid of Eastern and Western ideas came about.

The book is not awful by any means but it is certainly a bit ridiculous. Nothing happens in it that isn’t a means for Huxley to present his reader with his personal viewpoints on everything from sex to drugs to religion. Some ideas, like the Mutual Adoption Club (MAC), are patently fraught with problems that are never addressed, while actually many of his ideas – while impossible to ever implement anywhere – are very admirable. In particular, his keen awareness of ecology.

I was very surprised to notice a staggering amount of concepts lifted and adapted from Scientology – or, more likely, from L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics. I haven’t had internet access since reading the book so I haven’t been able to gauge what Huxley’s relationship was with the Church, but it shocked me that his famous utopian society – an antithesis to that presented in Brave New World – contains so much from a now maligned cult. I shall have to investigate further…